A document is usually shredded to render it unreadable and/or to prevent the document from being easily reassembled into its original form. Methods used to destruct documents include, for example, standard strip shredding or crosscut shredding, in which case the document is usually cut or torn into fine strips. There may be times when it is desirable to maintain the permanence of certain official documents, such as stock certificates or historical documents. In such case, should the document be accidentally or unintentionally shredded, or otherwise destructed, it would be desirable to recreate the document into its pristine condition.
Heretofore, reconstructing a shredded document can involve extremely tedious measures. One approach has been to align shredded portions one by one next to each other and determine whether images on the shredded portions match up. Once two portions are found to match up, additional portions may be added until the document is completed. For a one page document, such method may prove satisfactory, but for larger documents in which there have been generated a multitude of strips the task of reassembling the document, shredded portion by shredded portion, becomes impractical.
Moreover, once the proper positions of the shredded portions have been determined, the shredded portions must be fixed into those positions in order to recreate a document which resembles its original. This has been accomplished, for example, by attaching the shredded portions together with an adhesive tape or the like and running a photocopy of same. Alternatively, or additionally, the reassembly of the shredded portions has been scanned in by a scanner and an image generated by a computer. In either case, the reassembling of the shredded portions in the first place usually results in a degradation of the print quality from that of the original document. Of course, optical character recognition (OCR) may be used to recreate textual portions of a document, but OCR is unsatisfactory for documents containing non-textual images and still does not avoid the inconvenience of having to piecemeal reassemble the shredded portions of the document.